Thursday, November 7, 2013

The Washington Examiner: "Politifact's pants are on fire on coverage of Obamacare promises"

Sean Higgins of the Washington Examiner makes the logical expansion on the criticism of PolitiFact's "Half True" rating of President Obama's "You can keep it" promise. Higgins looks at PolitiFact's entire account of the promise.

Higgins may have pre-empted a similar story I had planned for Zebra Fact Check. He did such a good job there's little room for improvement except by making the story longer and more detailed.

Higgins:

The first of these six Politifact columns ran Oct. 7, 2008, and evaluated Obama's comment, “[I]f you've got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it.” It rated this as “true” since Obama was “accurately describing his [then-proposed] health care plan.”

In other words, it was grading him on the basis of “Did he really promise this?” and not the more relevant “Is this a plausible promise?”

Perhaps of greatest interest to me was the response Higgins received from PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan:

I asked Politifact’s editors whether they still stood by these columns. Editor Angie Holan did not respond directly, instead emailing me a round up of their more recent columns on aspects of the Obamacare debate. I asked again and she did not respond.

Apparently, Politifact thinks accountability is something that only applies to other people.

It seems that way sometimes. I've sent a fair number of emails to PolitiFact writer/editor teams pointing out unambiguous errors. It's normal to receive no response and to see the error go uncorrected.